Community policing is explained as a collaboration of community and the police working together to help identify and solve criminal activities. Additionally, the whole concept behind it is to promote public safety and to enhance the quality of life within the neighborhoods in which we reside in. Community policing is composed of two major components which are community partnership and problem solving. Community policing is a program that was initially started in the 1940’s. All of the support that was released for this program was materialized actually in the 1980’s. One of the main goals if not the most important goal was to bring in the law enforcement closer to their local public to help better establish relationships and partnerships. They would build these relationships and partnerships with local businesses, group organizations, local residents and social service agencies. The whole reason behind building these relationships was to help each other in the long run of having a better understanding of what was actually needed by the community and to address local problems. (Community Justice, pg. 26-7) Like we discussed earlier, partnerships and relationships are very important for community policing, but another topic for it would be organizational transformation. An easy to understand description of organizational transformation would be the alignment of organizational management, structure, personnel, and information systems that support community partnerships and problem solving. In my own words community policing is a better way to help our police force from being in multiple places at one time. For instance neighborhood watch programs are a great asset to have when you have the local community monitoring actions and situations that are occurring. With this type of program established, it gives the local police a chance to venture off into other locations to ensure they are patrolling in other
Bibliography: Community Justice, 2003, Todd Clear and Eric Cadora http://www.ncjrs.gov/criminal_justice2000/vol_2/02i2.pdf http://communityjusticeproject.gmcc.org/index.php http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bja/182437.pdf http://www.iirp.org/library/albany.html http://www.urban.org/publications/410789.html